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A Thousand Words To Go With Ours

Today on Tablet

by
Abigail Miller
October 24, 2011
Leora Laor, Untitled #100, 2002.(Courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery.)
Leora Laor, Untitled #100, 2002.(Courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery.)

We are delighted to announce that we are collaborating with the Andrea Meislin Gallery on the art for Scripture, Adam Kirsch’s column on postwar Jewish fiction. The gallery specializes in contemporary Israeli photography, much of it concerned with the same questions as the novels; rather than trying to illustrate literally the books or authors that Kirsch discusses, we hope to set up nuanced conversations between texts and images. Today, Kirsch’s argument that child protagonists of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, growing up during the Holocaust, dramatize our own awakening to the atrocities and tragedies of the real, adult world, reminded us of Leora Laor’s photographs from her 2006 show at Andrea Meislin, Wanderland #2. Laor’s digital photographs capture an urban world that is dark, alienating, and pixelated; the figures moving through it, often children, are isolated and vulnerable. The photo we’re using, “Untitled #100,” is from 21st-century Jerusalem, but the world it evokes is closer to the macabre wasteland of small towns in The Painted Bird.

And, in case you missed it, last month, when Adam wrote about Zionism, he was accompanied by photographs from Yuval Yairi.

Abigail Miller is Tablet Magazine’s art director.